Jnj > Jnj's Quotes

“What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth.”
― Christina Rossetti

“One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.”
― James Herriot, James Herriot's Cat Stories

“We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.”
― Martin Luther

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read.”
― Christian Bauman

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“In a time of destruction, create something.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”
― Donna Tartt

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Republicans gave the keys to the kingdom to a man who paid hush money to shut up a porn star he'd been sleeping with while married to his third wife, who'd recently given birth to their son. Are we surprised he's run afoul of the party's more cherished ideals?”
― Anonymous, A Warning

“Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.” —Theodore Roosevelt”
― Anonymous, A Warning

“Athens was the cautionary tale of how self-government could go wrong. It was an example of “direct democracy,” a society where the majority ruled and where citizens participated personally in the assembly, voting on the issues of the day by raising their hands. At first this was revolutionary, but in time, a herd-like mentality overcame the system. In the heat of the moment, the passions of the people could turn them into an angry mob, leading the majority into destructive decisions that proved to be their undoing.”
― Anonymous, A Warning

“It’s been said that character is a tree, and reputation its shadow.”
― Anonymous, A Warning

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“You know on TV when there’s one of those awkward, shocking moments and all you hear are the crickets in the background?

Well chirp fucking chirp...this is one of those moments.”
― Emma Chase, Tangled

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein